Bowdoin students, alumni, and staff in Sri Lanka escaped the wrath of December's tsunami, and they are quickly lining up to raise money for the relief effort.
The tsunami that resulted from a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra the morning of December 26 left hundreds of thousands dead or displaced in nations across south Asia.
Kalinga Tudor Silva, a visiting professor in the Asian Studies and Sociology departments, had returned to the inland city of Kandy from doing research on the east coast the night before the tsunami hit. When he received a call and turned on the news, he heard reports that "the sea has come on to the land."
Maggie Meyers '05 studied with Intercollegiate Sri Lanka Education (ISLE) at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy in the fall and had left Sri Lanka on December 21. On the morning of the 26th, "my sister called to wake me up to go look at the news," she said. "It was very surreal. I was trying to call Sri Lanka constantly and no phone lines were available for quite some time. It took a few hours to realize how enormous the disaster had been." Meyers, who had spent much of November and December in the town of Ambalangoda on the southwest coast for her independent study, worried about her friends, American and Sri Lankan, who she knew "had a far greater chance of being directly affected."
ISLE draws students from eight American liberal arts colleges, including Bowdoin, Colby, and Bates. Professor John Holt, chair of Bowdoin' Religion department, founded the interdisciplinary program in 1982 with a professor from Carleton College. The program is held every fall. Students live with local families and study religion, language, politics, history, and other fields, and scatter across the island during the last weeks of the program for independent studies.
"This program has really been responsible for the fruition of Sri Lankan studies in the United States," said Holt. More than 30 ISLE faculty members such as Silva have come to the associated American colleges on visiting professorships over the years.
ISLE is based at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, in Sri Lanka's interior, and all students and faculty have been accounted for. Tristan Gleason '01, the program assistant for ISLE last fall, was on the coast but managed to escape a flooding guesthouse, and his account of his experience has been posted on the Bowdoin web site.
ISLE has set up a tsunami relief fund and is hoping to raise $50,000, which will go to three non-government organizations in Sri Lanka?a Muslim women's relief organization, a suicide prevention and counseling group, and the International Center for Ethnic Studies, to help rebuild six elementary schools. Bowdoin has donated $5,000 towards the goal, as has ISLE itself. Holt emphasized that in this country of 20 million people, a little goes along way?the per capita income is $850 a year and the purchasing power of $25 there is the equivalent of $100 in America. "Giving takes very little effort on our behalf and it goes a long way," said Meyers.
A family concert to benefit the fund was scheduled for last Sunday but postponed due the snowstorm. ISLE administrative director Sree Padma Holt is currently working in Sri Lanka and posted a report on the Bowdoin web site on January 11.
John and Sree Padma Holt were in Laos when the tsunami hit and didn't hear about it until the evening of December 27 due to a power outage. At the Bangkok airport, they found embassies offering free phone calls to home and the Thai government offering free accommodation to all foreigners. They arrived in Sri Lanka on January 3. The shops in Kandy were depleted, as locals had bought goods and sent them to the coast.
"The most impressive thing to me was seeing how resilient these people are," said John Holt. "It was really inspirational. People were grieving, but they were sprung into action."
Silva has taught for ISLE since 1985. He comes from the town of Hikkaduwa on the south coast. "That whole day we were wondering what was happening to our friends and relatives in various places," he said.
Silva's family members survived, but one of his sisters was displaced when her house was flooded by a swollen river. He shared that the family of one of his junior colleagues survived the tsunami but was now displaced by natural disaster, as they had been displaced from their home in the north due to the nation's civil war, and that many people had been displaced first by war and then again by tsunami. According to Silva, the government has decreed that houses should no longer be built within 300 meters of the ocean, creating pressure on former coastal residents to find a new place to live.
One of Silva's students at Peradeniya was killed when the bus in which she was traveling back to school was swept away by the waters (according to Holt, 70 students and four faculty members from the University are still missing). The students were in no mood for classes after the tsunami and instead mobilized for relief efforts, sending food, clothing, and medicine. Silva reports that engineering students from the University helped build houses and temporary shelters for the displaced, while medical students organized medical camps and psychology students organized counseling.
Holt estimates that Sri Lanka will take a generation to recover. The economy, in which tourism plays a major part, has been hit hard by the tsunami. Silva says that all but 25 of 200 resort hotels in Hikkaduwa were destroyed. Fishing is also an important source of livelihood for the poor, and equipment and most of the nation's harbors have been destroyed.
Holt had hoped that the disaster would transcend Sri Lanka's ethnic divisions but the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam began to argue soon afterwards. "The political situation in the country continues to hurt it," he said.
While the world has opened its wallets to the tsunami's victims, Holt and Silva recommended grassroots organizations for faster implementation. Silva said of the Sri Lankan government's centrally-controlled relief effort, "as a sociologist, I feel there's not enough dialogue with the affected people."
Phil Friedrich '06 studied at ISLE last semester and left Sri Lanka on December 23. "There's a part of me that feels incredibly lucky to have made it out on time," he said. "This island has treated me so well and given me so much that I have this urge to give back to them." Friedrich recommends the ISLE fund for donations.
"This is a place where people were already struggling to satisfy their basic livelihood," said Meyers. "They're still going to be struggling for a very long time, so it's important that we continue to keep our eyes and ears open."
For instructions on donating to the ISLE fund, see ISLE's web site: http://academic.bowdoin.edu/isle.